Chapter Thirty

At the sight of her, Roarke fell to his knees.

Alive. She’s alive.

Relief sang through him. He said her name, and then grasped her to pull her close. It was like hugging a bag of bones.

Drake ducked in through the broken door. “This place is full of powder kegs. We’ve got to go now.”

Roarke lifted her. He was not as strong as he should be, but she weighed nothing in his arms. Violently kicking away debris from the splintered door, he followed Drake through the thick smoke.

Chaos reigned in Charles Town. In the street, women coaxed blindfolded horses in the opposite direction of the fire, while men, rolling up their sleeves, raced toward the blacksmith’s shop, from which the fire had spread to the ramparts. Soldiers out of uniform flooded in and out of the far door of the bastion, clutching firearms and rolling barrels of gunpowder into isolated piles. The glow of the fire cast flickering shadows. He and Drake didn’t bother using those shadows, as they had as they’d first approached the jail, because now no one paid any attention to two men running, one with a woman limp in his arms.

She started to cough, jerking in spasms against his chest.

“Stop ahead, Drake.”

The harsh, ragged sound of her coughing was music to his ears because it meant that she was alive, but it worried him as well. Drake veered off the dirt road between two houses. Roarke settled her against the wooden wall. He pushed her tangled hair off her brow as he spoke to Drake over his shoulder. “There should be a water pump behind one of these houses.”

His friend set off. Roarke laid her head back against the house to open her throat as widely as possible. Her breathing wheezed in her chest. He needed to get her away from all this smoke so she could clear her lungs.

Her dark lashes fluttered against her cheeks. She ran her tongue over her parched lips. “You,” she said, “have a strange habit of returning from the dead.”

Laughter shook him but caught in his throat. He seized her face. Soot stained her cheeks and her shift sagged over her shoulders, but to his eyes, this woman had never looked so beautiful. Despite her labored breathing, Roarke kissed those dry, parched lips.

He stopped kissing her only when he heard Drake coming down the alley, sloshing water over the ground.

“Drink,” Roarke said. He seized the pail and raised it to her lips.

She needed no encouragement. Water dribbled out of her mouth, over her chin, and in rivulets down her chest. She stopped only to breathe, and then set her lips to the edge of the pail again. She seemed to gain strength with each gulp, sitting up straight and grasping the pail herself.

She coughed suddenly, splattering water. He put the pail down and took some measure of relief from the fact that her hoarseness was abiding. When she finally lay back, he sensed that she’d be all right.

She brushed her fingers over the short bristle of his beard, and whispered, “I knew you would come for me.”

Roarke was glad that Drake had wandered to the street end of the alley and did not see the way Roarke tumbled from a crouch to his backside. It would not do to have his second-in-command see his captain knocked off balance by a woman’s soft words.

“Always,” he mustered, his throat dry from more than just smoke. “Always, my love.”

He pulled her into his arms again, close enough so he could feel her heart beating in her chest.

Another explosion shattered the night. His ears popped with the force of it. The sky erupted in a red-orange glow. Smoking pieces of wood clattered on the rooftops and skittered across the street, some landing, still glowing, in the alley where he pressed her against the wall.

“They missed a few kegs of powder,” Drake said drily, wincing as a smoking piece of wood struck him in the shoulder. He brushed it off. “Leighton will have to pull his men from the waterfront now.”

Roarke understood the unspoken. If Leighton pulled his men from the waterfront, then they wouldn’t have to take the long, dark route overland to cross to where the Neptune waited, a route that would slow down the healthiest of men, never mind a woman who looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week. If they could make it to the waterfront, they could steal a boat and row their way around while Adriana rested inside.

Roarke flexed his hands over her shoulders. “Can you walk?”

“I can do better,” she said, pushing away from the wall. “I can run.”

Watching her struggle to her feet gave rise to two equally strong emotions within him: A fierce pride for her grit, cut with a grounding humility that such a woman would find him worthy of her.

Later, once they were safe, he would tell her all of this. He gave Drake a nod and they plunged into a street still raining with ash. Townsfolk raced away from the fire, patting embers from their own clothes. Dogs darted through the streets. The scent of burning cypress grew stronger. By the fortification gates, a cluster of townspeople were trying to reform a water brigade, shouting to others to gather the buckets abandoned in the square.

Drake’s pace stuttered as they stumbled into that open square. They all came to a sudden stop. Roarke reached back and drew Adriana behind him. He knew she’d seen sights like this on the deck of many a pirate ship, but he would spare her if he could. He didn’t much like the British Navy, but it gave him no pleasure to see young soldiers speared by wooden slivers, men sprawled and broken like dolls, and pieces of bodies caught in the eaves.

“They were blown here,” Drake said quietly. “From the last explosion.”

“Probably trying to save the powder.”

Roarke wasn’t sure what drew his eye to that one particular body. It was as covered with blood as the rest. No sword hung from the officer’s missing belt, and his clothes were torn and charred. Maybe he noticed because the smoky glow of the fire gleamed on one epaulet. Or maybe Roarke just knew all too well the set of that rigid, unmoving, pockmarked jaw.

His old enemy was dead. The man who had imprisoned and half-starved Adriana now lay broken in a colonial square. Adam was avenged. Roarke waited for the surge of triumph he’d always anticipated, but it never came.

Leighton held no power over him anymore.

“There’ll be a crowd on the beach,” Drake said, eyeing the swarm of people racing out of the fortification gates. “Stealing a boat won’t be easy.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Roarke drew Adriana against his side. “We don’t have to hurry anymore.”

***

Adriana stood at the stern of the Neptune, watching the glow over Charles Town as the ship made its way past Hog Island. With the ship almost at full sail, Roarke left his command. She breathed a sigh of relief as he slipped his arms around her and laid his chin on her head.

She hugged his arms against her midriff. “We’re safe.”

“Are you feeling any better?”

She felt as if she’d been pounded against rocks like dirty linen, but he didn’t need to know that. “I’m hungry,” she ventured. “I could eat a horse.”

“I’ve already sent the cook to heat up a meal for both of us.”

She closed her eyes and settled into the warm circle of his arms. Every bruise and scrape on her battered body throbbed. Despite the ache, a rippling sense of anticipation seized her when she felt the rocking of the ship shift from the calm waters of the inlet to the rhythmic sway of the open sea.

“I was so worried about you.” She watched the glow in the distance dim. “Leighton told me nothing, except that he was using me for bait to catch you.”

“You were strong bait. Leighton would have succeeded a dozen times over, if I’d had my way. Drake put a stop to every reckless effort I made to rescue you. That man has a vicious left hook.”

She turned in his arms to look at him more closely, wondering if, because of the smoke and haze and the thrill of seeing him, she’d only imagined the smoothness of his cheek. “Your fever wasn’t from smallpox.”

“No.” He shrugged. “Some kind of swamp fever.” He captured the hand she’d laid on his chest and kissed her knuckles. “It passed in less than a week, but left me shaky. By the time I escaped quarantine, Leighton had every entrance to Charles Town guarded and he’d put a phalanx of soldiers around the jail to guard you. He shifted the watches on the ramparts every four hours so they would stay alert.”

“But how did you escape from quarantine in the first place? When Leighton dragged me to jail, he left six soldiers picketed around the house.”

He blew out a long sigh and found some interest in the horizon beyond her head. “That was someone else’s stupid, reckless doing.”

Her heart did a little skitter. She said, “Joachim?” though she already suspected she was wrong.

“Joachim escaped later,” he said. “To his freedom, I suspect.”

Good. The voice in her heart spoke firm. Good.

“But that Gaillard boy of yours,” he continued, “nearly got all of us killed.”

“Etienne.” Her heart did a little skip-beat.

“Had I any real strength in me when he proposed the escape, he’d have learned what an uppercut to the jaw felt like. But while half-dead from fever, I could only argue with him over the map of Charles Town he’d found on your table.”

She remembered that map. She’d purchased a copy because she’d been looking to buy a warehouse. She needed someplace where she could store all the cargo from the ships coming in and out of the bay.

All those concerns now up in smoke.

“Once I regained some strength, your Frenchman brought me to the map and showed me a route between houses that led to the fortification walls. He knew of a hole dug deep enough under one part of the fortifications for a man with a bag of goods to smuggle through."

“Smuggle?!”

“Apparently your young swain earned some cash slipping goods through the swamp. He knew the lay of the land well enough to warn me that the water was high this season.”

Her thoughts tumbled over one another. All those trips to Charles Town…. Did his father know, and approve?

“Once I was beyond the fortifications,” Roarke continued, “he told me to find my men and my ship. I was sure Leighton had seized both, but your friend knew otherwise.”

“How?”

Roarke hesitated. In the dim light of the evening, starlight gleamed on the planes of his face. “After Etienne left your house that night, he set out to confront me. Itching for a fight, I suspect.”

Guilt was a sharp needle plunging deep.

“But as you know, I was not in my lodgings. So he rowed out to the Neptune to confront me.”

“And found Drake,” she said softly. “Who figured out that something was terribly wrong.”

“Your boy told me that he saw the Neptune raise sail as soon as he rowed back to shore.”

She sighed. Poor Etienne. It was one thing for him to know that she loved Roarke. It was another thing for him to come to the disheartening conclusion that Roarke had spent the night in her arms.

“But the soldiers around the house,” she said, plowing forward, “how did you get past them? Did you bribe them?”

“Your foolish Frenchman made himself the bait.”

She caught her breath.

“He’s about my height, he has dark hair, and he was wearing my clothes. The soldiers didn’t know he was in the house. He said that if he were to run out the back door in the middle of the night, those soldiers could only assume the escapee was me.”

Her mind flashed with the memory of Etienne laughing as he raced her through the woods around the Santee, tearing ahead of her, the dirty bottoms of his feet flashing, his linen shirt billowing around his slim frame, his silhouette weaving through the shadows of trees, his body springing up and soaring over a fallen trunk, his laughter fading as he disappeared, ghostly, deep in the backwoods.

“The soldiers,” she stuttered, “had muskets.”

“Settled across their legs as they dozed.”

“But Etienne only had moments—”

“—seconds—”

“—before they rose up and aimed.”

“The damned fool bolted out of the house so fast that the soldiers didn’t get a chance to fire off a shot. By the time the soldiers mustered and gave chase, he had a good start. As soon as the soldiers dispersed, Joachim and I slipped out and went our separate ways.”

Reckless, brave, gentle Etienne! She’d never known him as well as she thought she did. But he’d proven that his love was so true that he was willing to risk his own life to save the life of the man she loved.

She hoped someday to see him again. She hoped to come upon him living in a whitewashed house in the deep woods with a lovely Huguenot wife and surrounded by a dozen dark-haired, doe-eyed children.

She curled back into Roarke’s embrace, pulling his arm around her so they both could see the glow of Charles Town burning.

“Did you set the fire,” she asked, “to create a distraction?”

“No, although we considered it. We considered everything, even digging a tunnel.”

“Through a swamp?”

“I would have done it with my bare hands. Every day I woke up sure we’d get news from our outposts that Leighton had ordered the trial to begin. But apparently, friends in the city objected to your arrest.”

She raised her brows. Leighton had made her think that she had been abandoned by everyone.

She was far more powerful than she’d ever thought.

“When one of our men came to tell us about the fire,” Roarke said, “I convinced Drake to take advantage of the chaos to slip into the city.”

“And you called Etienne a reckless fool.”

“Twenty-seven days you languished in that dirty jail cell. I wouldn’t allow it one day more.”

His grip tightened around her. She turned her face so her cheek pressed against his warm chest. She heard his heart beating fast as his hands slid up and down her arms, as if he couldn’t find a good enough grip.

“It’s my fault,” he said into her hair, “that you’ve lost everything you’ve worked for. I can’t even ask you to forgive me.”

She thought about her fine garden, the silks folded amid lavender in the chest at the foot of her bed, and the bag of coins hidden under the loose floorboard in the parlor. She thought about the map on her dining room table and the plans she’d left behind.

And, strangely, she thought of Joaquim, his dark face bright with silent laughter, as he finally ran unfettered through the backwoods.

“Let it all go up in smoke,” she whispered, curling her hand around his arm. “My real fortune is with you.”